Unladen Swallow was an attempt to bring LLVM optimisations to the CPython runtime, but hasn't seen significant activity for the last year. Now, a Unladen swallow retrospective confirms that the project is defunct and is no longer being developed. What happened?

A whole batch of new Ruby VM releases is available. MacRuby 0.8 fixes bugs and begins the path to 1.0. Rubinius 1.2 improves memory efficiency and the debugger. MRI received new patch levels: 1.8.7-p330 and 1.9.2-p136, the first big bug fix update to 1.9.2.

Rubinius 1.1 is out, with JIT and performance improvements, more powerful debugging and profiling capabilities. Also: the GIL algorithm gets an overhaul in 1.1 - but it'll soon be history. In the Hydra branch of the Rubinius project, a GIL-less Rubinius is being groomed, soon to join JRuby, IronRuby and MacRuby in the GIL-less VM crowd. InfoQ caught up with Evan Phoenix about the Hydra branch.

The standardization of Ruby is making progress: after the announcement in 2008, a first draft of the standard has been published. What does this mean for RubySpec, the executable Ruby specification, and the other Ruby implementations?

The first beta of Rails 3 is available. Rails 3 is a major rewrite of the codebase bringing with it stable APIs and design decisions inspired by Merb, cleaner internals, performance improvements and much more. InfoQ takes a look at the changes in Rails 3, and on which Ruby implementations it runs.

Rubinius has just released their first candidate for 1.0, bringing Ruby 1.8 compatibility and near speed parity. InfoQ talked to Evan Phoenix about what it took to get here and whether Rubinius will run Rails.

Beta 2 of MacRuby 0.5 improves compatibility and adds new tools for Ahead of Time (AOT) compilation and building standalone applications. Rubinius 0.13 was released with improved performance using LLVM, a JIT and a new compiler.

MacRuby is nearing its first RC for 0.5 and adds support for Grand Central Dispatch. A new IronRuby release is available, Ruby 1.9.2 might be delayed, and Rubinius joins the group of 1.8.7 compliant Ruby implementations.

Ruby 1.9.2 Preview 1 is now available and brings API improvements such as Method#parameters, GC optimization for long lived objects, and more. Also: to keep up to speed with Ruby implementations, David A. Black announced ruby-versions.net which provides a long list of MRI versions as well as JRuby, Rubinius and REE installations.

Dmitry Jemerov is the lead developer of the RubyMine IDE project at JetBrains. RubyMine is the new integrated development environment from JetBrains focusing on helping Ruby and Ruby on Rails developers be more productive and efficient programmers.

MountainWest RubyConf took place from 13-14 March in Salt Lake City. All talks are available from Confreaks; we picked some interesting ones – Rails 3 and Merb, DSL design, usability on Rails, Vertebra – and give a coarse summary and some pointers into the talks.